2.1. Lexical Structure¶

2.1.1. Identifiers¶

Identifiers start with a alphabetic character or ‘_’ followed by any number of alphabetic characters, ‘_’ or digits ([0-9]). Squirrel is a case sensitive language, this means that the lowercase and uppercase representation of the same alphabetic character are considered different characters. For instance “foo”, “Foo” and “fOo” will be treated as 3 distinct identifiers.

2.1.2. Keywords¶

The following words are reserved words by the language and cannot be used as identifiers:

Keywords are covered in detail later in this document.

2.1.3. Operators¶

Squirrel recognizes the following operators:

2.1.4. Other tokens¶

Other used tokens are:

2.1.5. Literals¶

Squirrel accepts integer numbers, floating point numbers and strings literals.

Pesudo BNF

IntegerLiteral        ::=  [1-9][0-9]* | '0x' [0-9A-Fa-f]+ | ''' [.]+ ''' | 0[0-7]+
FloatLiteral          ::=  [0-9]+ '.' [0-9]+
FloatLiteral          ::=  [0-9]+ '.' 'e'|'E' '+'|'-' [0-9]+
StringLiteral         ::=  '"'[.]* '"'
VerbatimStringLiteral ::=  '@''"'[.]* '"'

2.1.6. Comments¶

A comment is text that the compiler ignores but that is useful for programmers. Comments are normally used to embed annotations in the code. The compiler treats them as white space.

The /* (slash, asterisk) characters, followed by any sequence of characters (including new lines), followed by the */ characters. This syntax is the same as ANSI C.:

/*
this is
a multiline comment.
this lines will be ignored by the compiler
*/

The // (two slashes) characters, followed by any sequence of characters. A new line not immediately preceded by a backslash terminates this form of comment. It is commonly called a “single-line comment.”:

//this is a single line comment. this line will be ignored by the compiler

The character # is an alternative syntax for single line comment.:

# this is also a single line comment.

This to facilitate the use of squirrel in UNIX-style shell scripts.